HP Replaces Head of Storage Sales

Hewlett-Packard has made another change to its executive storage lineup: Mark Gonzalez, senior Americas VP of storage and server sales, is leaving his post to pursue other interests. Taking his place is Christopher M. Riley, who since May 2006 has been VP of sales and marketing at Gryphon Networks, a CRM vendor based in Norwood, Mass.

Riley also has storage experience. Now in his early forties, he worked for nearly 12 years as a manager at EMC before joining Comdisco in 1998. From there, he went on to co-found Centrepath, which offered business continuity and data replication services in the days of the "storage service provider" trend. He then took on North American sales for CNT, and joined McData when that company acquired CNT in 2006.

HP confirmed Riley's appointment as the new VP, Americas enterprise storage sales, this morning. The changes take effect today. It's not yet clear who Riley will report to inside the HP organization.

Riley has already vacated his job at Gryphon Networks, and two other execs have also left the Gryphon masthead as of last night. Among the missing are Dan Cudgma, formerly president of Gryphon Networks, who had come from another storage service provider, the late StorageNetworks, where he was SVP of worldwide sales. Also gone from Gryphon is Tim Hackett, formerly VP of business development, who also worked at StorageNetworks until joining Gryphon in 2004.

It's not known what Mark Gonzalez has in mind for his next post, or whether in fact he'll be leaving HP. A longtime HP exec, he came to the company from Compaq and prior to that worked at DEC.HP's storage products have done well in recent months. But at least one industry source outside the company, who asked not to be named, says execs are being driven to do even better. "Hurd has been putting pressure on the storage guys," the source says.

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